So far, Lemmy > Reddit. Was able to easily find equivalent communities and honestly, I enjoy it. :)
this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2023
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Technology
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That's why I'm here. Still have some stuff to figure out (and I'll really miss BaconReader for mobile) but I'm getting used to this as a replacement.
Honestly, I appreciate the protests, but this whole kerfuffle got me to realize how much I... don't like reddit anymore? There are certain communities that I'll stick around for (shoutout to /r/BravoRealHousewives), but I've already set up an RSS server for news and I'm probably going to unsub from a LOT of the more general ones. Too many bots, too much negativity, etc.
This is like watching an incredibly slow train wreck. We know what the outcome looks like, but are (mostly) powerless to stop it unless these blackouts work.
Yeah it's like watching a drunk man confidently walk out into oncoming traffic in a moment of hubris. Everyone can see what's about to happen except him.
Meh I hope reddit dies. Greedy dbag MBA tools
Its nice that Reddit is promoting Lemmy like this. I just wish they would give us more time to optimize the code so that it can handle all the new users. For now it looks like many Lemmy instances will be completely overloaded from Monday, but lets see.
They can pitch a fit and protest all they want, but the only real way to get traction is to show there is a viable alternative. Want to renegotiate your Oracle license fees? Run a credible fraction of your enterprise on PostgreSQL. Want to get WotC to stop screwing 3rd party publishers with a new license? Start playing pathfinder. These are only two examples that I've experienced. Twitter will never improve as long as people keep using it. If reddit API users (3rd party apps) shift 5 to 20 % of use to Lemmy, you'll see API pricing drop incredibly fast.
Such a blackout could help accomplish that goal though.
The blackout must be accompanied from a viable alternative easily presented. I just learned about lemmy and I’m trying to see if I can have a place here. I don’t plan on leaving Reddit forever but you never know, and this api fiasco has at least shown me alternatives I never knew existed.
Lemmy is good, it's still rough around the edges but still useable, its not bad at all, the influx of people overload the servers tho, but it will certainly improve, and the current app (Jerboa for Android) is not as good as the popular Reddit clients for the moment, but it's definitely better than the Reddit official app.
I kind of hope redreader either switches to lemmy or helps improve Jerboa.
/u/whupazz has RedReader connecting to Lemmy via a api translation gateway he is building: https://imgur.com/a/IF5HYGz
I deleted my almost 11 year old account and moved here because of this. I used there shitty app for way too long and after switching to Apollo i suddenly saw all the old subreddits I subscribed too become more prominent in my feed. On there app if felt like I was getting fed rage bait.
Same! I used nothin but Boost, the idea of going to their main app was atrocious, why actively alienate your userbase? They've been falling into a corporate shit-hole for too long
I tried to use Reddit over old.reddit and I was OK with it for a while, but I gave up when topics with barely any engagement would show up at the "top" in my feed and I would get suggestions from other subreddits that I wasn't a part of.
I can adapt to a UI given time and I did like some aspects of their new layout. I'm not on board with desperately trying to fill my feed with "something new" every time I visit the site though because sometimes I want to follow up on a topic from earlier. It just kept burying things and I switched back to old.reddit after maybe six months of trying the new one.
For the sake of the app developers, I hope Reddit reverses course, sets a more reasonable cost, or the devs find ways to hook into something like Lemmy so they can keep doing what they do best. That said, I'm happy to have found a much better community in the whole process :)
Yup, old time reddit user here. Sad to see this, but excited to see where the change will lead.
Loss is nothing else but change, and change is nature's delight.
- MA
More power to the protest, but I am skeptical that it will do much good. I think reddit has strayed so far from its original mission and values that today it is nothing like the platform the reddit founders originally envisioned.
I think the reddit executives have probably already run the numbers on this and don't care if every single user & mod who uses 3rd party apps and the API walks away from their platform. At this point they only care about the IPO and what they need to do to increase shareholder value after the IPO.
They may even see the exodus as a positive. They may think of these power users and API-utilizing mods as a drag on their bandwidth and worse, they are users who seldom if ever see any ads and increase their ad-viewing numbers.
Will the quality of reddit content suffer? I think it very likely will. It's already been going downhill for a while now.
However, the executives mostly don't care about content quality, either. As long as the free content they get from their users doesn't stray into illegal and controversial waters, they are happy. If the content is mediocre memes and cat photos, they are quite happy with that. The goal is to serve as many ads up to as many users per hour as possible. They are banking on millions of "casuals" to stick around and scroll through the content and see those ads. Content quality is way down the list of their concerns.
My guess is the suits are are no longer interested in an "engagement" platform in the same way that Twitter and Facebook try to be (in their own ham-fisted and evil social-engineering ways). At this stage of the game, reddit just wants to be a mindless app that bored people can scroll while in the doctor's waiting room, the airport, in the bathroom, or wherever they are and need to kill time.
Have the reddit suits made a miscalculation here? Will the exodus make reddit another "not cool anymore" type of platform like Digg that almost everyone abandons? Will the mass exodus only leave bots and karma farmers behind to talk to each other? Maybe, I don't know. It's hard to predict that kind of thing. But I think the execs are willing to roll the dice on this because short-term profits are all they care about since they will be going public. If the bots and karma farmers fool the people buying ads, reddit will just roll with that.
(You'd hope anyone buying ads on reddit would check to make sure their investment is actually increasing their sales...but there's a lot of poorly managed businesses out there).
Either way....for those of us who enjoyed old reddit (and Digg before that, and Usenet before that) I think the path forward is a new platform such as this one.
Problem for reddit is, the people contributing through posts or comments are the ones most likely take offence to the new API pricing, and losing those people will be exponentially more hurtful for reddit than losing your average redditor. The proportion of people commenting, posting and upvoting is incredibly small compared to the total user number
The circus is burning, as its owners tried to heat it up. Let us enjoy watching the flames from a safe distance.
I'm still a bit sad about Reddit's seemingly approaching ending. I never cared about Twitter so moving to Mastodon was a snap, but Reddit has had loads of amazing content posted and I've enjoyed it for 15+ years. I love the Fediverse, and Lemmy is great, but it may take some time before these platforms and communities can replace Reddit for me.
I worry that content disappearing will be a bigger problem on the Fediverse, as instances come and go.
Yeah. As much as I want to abandon Reddit completely if they go through with this, I'll probably be forced to use new reddit and the official app because most communities probably wont migrate at all. There are many niche communities that I'm subscribed to, like related to a specific anime/LN series that's not too big.
Just for curiosity: which is the anime/light novel series?
On-topic: I hope that other communities start migrating, once Reddit's downwards spiral becomes too hard to ignore. I'm also considering to set up a few weaboo communities and one for conlangs, once I find a good instance for that. (lemmy.ml is already rather overburdened; perhaps someone could set up an instance for this sort of geeky stuff?)
There are many but a few that come to mind that I've been browsing a lot recently are:
- r/KumoDesu : The final volume (volume 16) is coming out on the 20th and I've started rereading the series. I actually finished reading the WN a couple of days ago (I love this series so much asdfaklmsv).
- r/IsekaiOjisan : Just plain fun
- r/Mashle : Not small but still one of my favourites. I don't watch shonen a lot but this is a great manga.
I've considered hosting a couple of fediverse (and nextcloud) servers before but servers are expensive 😞
I mainly want an exact alternative to r/Anime and r/Manga for the episode discussions and I also want r/WritingPrompts and r/Animemes because those are my gotos to kill time.
I've been meaning to check out Kumo for a while. I'm a big fan of Honzuki no Gekokujou and apparently there's a lot of overlap in the fan base.
I watched a little over one season of Honzuki no Gekokujou and I didn't find too interesting tbh (I only watched that many episodes because I was really bored at the time). It just felt like a "base building game" (I can't think of any other analogy for some reason). Is there something I'm missing, like the anime not adapting the source material well? Because I see a lot of people who like but I can't seem to understand why. To be clear, I don't think it's that bad but it seems more popular than it should be.
The beginning is a bit slow, I will admit, but the first season is a very good adaptation overall (later seasons skip a lot). So maybe it's just not your cup of tea. I don't think I follow the base-building analogy 🤔
As for its popularity, I think it does a lot of things really well, better than most other series, and the sum of it is superb.
- Characterization: there are almost no 1-dimensional characters. Even random side characters, or seemingly comic relief characters, have their own motivations and goings-on outside of what Myne (the unreliable narrator) sees. These are often revealed to the reader in side stories, and can recontextualize a lot of what's happening.
- World building: we start with a straightforward medieval city. Then a small bit of magic is introduced. Then we find out about a bit how the country is governed, then more about how magic works, histories, politics...all in a satisfying way, because Kazuki-sensei planned the whole story from the beginning. Which brings me to:
- Foreshadowing: EVERYTHING is a Chekov's gun. There's a lot of stuff to find on a re-read, and the theorycrafting people come up with in the weekly chapter releases is a lot of fun too.
- Themes: this series does not shy away from serious themes. Poverty, children starving, sexual assault, the ramifications of a strict caste system, slavery...There's a lot that sucked about medieval times. But also:
- Humor: absolutely great comedic moments. It's rare for a book to make me laugh out loud. For example, there's a scene where Myne hosts what is essentially a J-Pop concert and it's just nuts.
I could go on...tl;dr it's a great series!
Glad to see so many subreddits contributing to this. Reddit IPO is the worst thing that happened to it and the original founders would have never allowed reddit to get to this point.
The thing is that people would gladly play 2-5usd/mo to keep 3rd party clients but Reddit is making super difficult on purpose. No way they are getting 5usd/mo per user from ads.
This is the third time Ive written this out because Jerboa keeps crashing so Im using the web interface instead!
Hopefully, I'll remember the salient points I made and maybe be even more succinct!
and the original founders would have never allowed Reddit to get to this point.
Unfortunately, at least one of the original founders has allowed, quite possibly even driven this policy. Steve Huffman is still very much at the helm and what he has exposed of himself in interviews, he doesn't sound like a very nice person (re: post apocalypse, he sees himself being on top and having slaves)
It's great that subs and users are organising to fight this but maybe Reddit should be allowed to carry out this change and metaphorically shoot itself in the face? This is just the latest in a long horrifying series of policies that the admins have pushed through, actions they have failed to take, or when they finally did, it was long after the horse had bolted.
Remember the jailbait (and worse) subs that they allowed for so long (and were rumoured to have participated in) and when they finally did something after Anderson Cooper shone a light under that dark, seedy rock, they picked their sacrificial lamb and blamed it all on him? Remember the secret santa parallel site someone set up that Reddit then forcibly absorbed and let wilt? Remember how they dealt with Victoria who arranged all the celebrity IAMA's? Remember how they brought in Ellen Pao (with her own set of issues) to deal with horrific amount of far right and misogynist subs that were actively calling for peoples and groups deaths, and then threw her under the bus once they got what they needed? Remember how they were banning people and deleting posts when it was revealed that 5 mod accounts were basically controlling the top 100 subs? Remember how they appointed to the admins a person who was found to be grooming teens and was supportive of their father who was convicted of serious sexual assault of a child?
The list is never-ending....
The sad fact of the matter is that centralised social medias one driving factor is money. They acquire that via data points collection from engagement. They dont care what kind of engagement as long as theres plenty of it and hateful content drives engagement.
There is no sense of community among the admins and execs of Reddit. It is entirely from the users.
The original founders allowed this to happen, if they didn't drive this. Many similar times previously, and undoubtedly, many more times to come.
Maybe Reddit, just like every other centralised, corporate owned social media sites time is over?
I just dont believe its something worth fighting for, despite how commendable the actions of all those subs is.
Quick side question: How did you get to beehaw from the jerboa app? I only see lemmy.ml stuff on it and can't find a way to add other communities.
I clicked the 3 bars on the left side of the interface, then "add account" and entered beehaw details
I had not noticed that the list of instances was longer than originally shown. Thank you for sharing screen shots. Hopefully if someone else had the same question, that clears it up!
I typed in beehaw.org myself - it wasnt in the list. That only seems to offer up 3 lemmy instances
I didn't know you could type in that list?! It didn't look like a field that allowed that. Good to know for the future!
I'm able to find some BeeHaw communities by searching them in the app.
Checking again, you're right. I am seeing the odd thing now. Maybe i was looking for a way to see just the beehaw feed and purposefully bounce back and forth as desired.
I know what you mean. I'm also discovering i need to pivot my perspective from Reddit-style usage.
It's also odd that i was able to find a couple BeeHaw communities but some others never showed up. I'm on mobile at work so i haven't been able to investigate.
Yeah, it's exciting to see things differently. Especially since, for the moment, things are a bit smaller here. I'm liking the idea of everything so far. Perhaps the app needs a few things added. Most definitely, I have a lot to learn!
That’s what I want too. It’s time to take more control over platforms we use (and platforms that make money off of us existing). I’m happy most blackout posts either mention lemmy as an alternative directly, or it’s in the top 5 comments.
When all the apps are effectively blocked I bet they push a release to the stores with directions to an alternative. Can Apollo, RiF, Boost, Sync and all the others launch gateways and point their users at the fediverse?
They could, but have no incentive to do so unless the dev specifically likes the fediverse or something.
Seems like either Reddit takes a new stance or these app devs will need to point at something else.
I've people who remember the web in the late 90s / early 2000s, repeatedly comment that they miss finding weird, leftfield and wacky blogs and sites and that the last decade has been corporates vacuuming up anything that was interesting, subsuming it into their ecosphere to then let it wither and die because they didn't understand it, just that it was gaining popularity.
If you look at the front page of Reddit now, its just recycled memes, content cross posted from the same corporate own sites such as Twitter and TikTok and endless reposts by bot accounts that are karma farming so they can be used for astro turfing.
There are niche communities and they are the ones suffering from this API policy but its time they all bailed and found better homes.
Absolutely. The "old web" was perhaps a bit on the (visually) ugly side, but we were free. Not much corporate going on, but much exploring the seemingly infinite possibilities together, as free users. Sure, there were some small online shops for hobbyists and special interest stuff, but they always were - in my experience - firmly connected to if not operated and driven by that community. It is hard to describe - it simply was great. The final frontier, so it seemed. Connect to freaks like yourself all over the world, or explore new exiting topics, music, cultures. Learn a ton of stuff for free. Really connect.
But then capitalism crept in - I cannot even draw a clear line when that all happened (Can someone here help me out here?) and as we all know now they built their monopolies and now the web is made up of those "five corporate websites showing screenshots of the other four" or how that famous quote went. I really think and hope the fediverse is a opportunity to rebuild a better, user-centered web.
That being said, is there a kind of implementation of the fediverse for / with projects like peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol (e.g. IPFS) and/or the onion web? (or perhaps that's material for another discussion/thread, eh?)
Reddit has shown their cards and in my opinion even if they walk back these changes the writing has been on the wall for a while that they are looking to change the site in ways that people who prefer old Reddit will likely not prefer. It would be better to move on
Yeah, I already pulled the trigger on deleting my account. I've no interest in staying there with what they're doing, and like you said, even if they roll back on it I'm done. They've shown time and again they give zero shits about the user base, and I for one am sick of it.
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